Dan Luu (Hacker News):
Despite my connection being only a bit worse than it was in the 90s, the vast majority of the web wouldn’t load. Why shouldn’t the web work with dialup or a dialup-like connection? It would be one thing if I tried to watch youtube and read pinterest. It’s hard to serve videos and images without bandwidth. But my online interests are quite boring from a media standpoint. Pretty much everything I consume online is plain text, even if it happens to be styled with images and fancy javascript.
[…]
More recently, I was reminded of how poorly the web works for people on slow connections when I tried to read a joelonsoftware post while using a flaky mobile connection. The HTML loaded but either one of the five CSS requests or one of the thirteen javascript requests timed out, leaving me with a broken page. Instead of seeing the article, I saw three entire pages of sidebar, menu, and ads before getting to the title because the page required some kind of layout modification to display reasonably. Pages are often designed so that they’re hard or impossible to read if some dependency fails to load. On a slow connection, it’s quite common for at least one depedency to fail.
[…]
While it’s easy to blame page authors because there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit on the page side, there’s just as much low-hanging fruit on the browser side. Why does my browser open up 6 TCP connections to try to download six images at once when I’m on a slow satellite connection? That just guarantees that all six images will time out!
[…]
For another level of ironic, consider that while I think of a 50kB table as bloat, Google’s AMP currently has > 100kB of blocking javascript that has to load before the page loads! There’s no reason for me to use AMP pages because AMP is slower than my current setup of pure HTML with a few lines of embedded CSS and the occasional image, but, as a result, I’m penalized by Google (relative to AMP pages) for not “accelerating” (deccelerating) my page with AMP.
Previously: Web Bloat Score Calculator, The Problem With AMP.
Update (2017-02-10): Bill Murray:
Before you marry a person you should first make them use a computer with slow internet to see who they really are.
Update (2017-02-20): See also: Juho Snellman.
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) CSS JavaScript Web
Airbnb:
We have dozens of modules and several 3rd-party libraries written in Swift, comprising thousands of files and hundreds of thousands of lines of code. As if the size of this Swift codebase weren’t enough of a challenge, the fact that Swift 2 and Swift 3 modules cannot import each other further complicated the migration process. Even correct Swift 3 code that imports Swift 2 libraries will not compile. This incompatibility made it difficult to parallelize code conversion.
[…]
While we were excited about Swift 3’s new language features, we also wanted to understand how the update would affect our end users and overall developer experience. We closely monitored Swift 3’s impact on release IPA size and debug build time, since these have been our two largest Swift pain points so far. Unfortunately, after experimenting with different optimization settings, Swift 3 still scored marginally worse on both metrics.
[…]
A number of things have changed, but most importantly the parameter in completionBlock has changed from an implicitly unwrapped optional to an optional. This can break its usage within the blocks.
[…]
Optional protocol methods are easy to accidentally miss during a Swift 3 conversion.
Airbnb iOS iOS App Programming Swift Programming Language
Robert C. Martin:
So how do you test-drive an algorithm like this? At first it might seem simple. For each test, create an small array of doubles, predict the results, and then write the test that compares the predicted results with the output of the algorithm.
There are several problems with this approach. The first is data-overload. Even the smallest array is a 3X3 with 9 different values to check. The next smallest is 5X5 with 25 values. Then 9X9 with 81 values. Trying to write a comprehensive set of tests, even for the 3X3 case, would be tedious at best; and very difficult for someone else to understand.
The second problem is that test-driving from the raw results forces us to write the whole algorithm very early in the testing process. There’s no way to proceed incrementally.
[…]
This is a rather different slant an a spy test double. Rather than giving us booleans and flags to inspect about the calls of individual functions, this spy is going to load the actions string with the sequence of things that happened as the algorithm proceeded.
Java Programming Testing
Lesley Fair:
Consumers have bought more than 11 million internet-connected Vizio televisions since 2010. But according to a complaint filed by the FTC and the New Jersey Attorney General, consumers didn’t know that while they were watching their TVs, Vizio was watching them. The lawsuit challenges the company’s tracking practices and offers insights into how established consumer protection principles apply to smart technology.
Starting in 2014, Vizio made TVs that automatically tracked what consumers were watching and transmitted that data back to its servers. Vizio even retrofitted older models by installing its tracking software remotely. All of this, the FTC and AG allege, was done without clearly telling consumers or getting their consent.
John Gruber:
The lack of respect for consumer privacy in this case is just appalling.
Nick Heer:
The FTC got involved and today announced that they would be fining Vizio the paltry sum of $2.2 million.
Update (2017-03-06): Josh Centers:
For a simpler solution, just don’t connect your TV to the Internet. If you want to use Netflix and other apps, get an Apple TV, which has the best privacy policy in the business[…]
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai (via John Gruber):
A company that sells “smart” teddy bears leaked 800,000 user account credentials—and then hackers locked it and held it for ransom.
Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Lawsuit Privacy Television Vizio
